Founding Product Engineer

Who We Are:

Emerge Career’s mission is to break the cycle of poverty and incarceration. We’re not just building software; we’re creating pathways to real second chances. Through an all-in-one platform deeply embedded within the criminal justice system, we recruit, train, and place justice-impacted individuals into life-changing careers.

Our vision is to become the country’s unified workforce development system, replacing disconnected brick-and-mortar job centers with one integrated, tech-powered solution that meets low-income individuals exactly where they are. Today, the federal government spends billions annually on education and training programs, yet only about 70% of participants graduate, just 38.6% secure training-related employment, and average first-year earnings hover around $34,708.

By contrast, our seven-person team has already outperformed the job centers in two entire states (Vermont and South Dakota) in just the past year. With an 89% graduation rate and 92% of graduates securing training-related employment, our alumni aren’t just getting jobs—they’re launching new lives with average first-year earnings of $77,352. The results speak for themselves, and we’re just getting started.

Before Emerge, our founders Zo and Gabe co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit that is dismantling the prison communication duopoly. Backed by tech luminaries like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Jack Dorsey, and by major criminal-justice philanthropies such as Arnold Ventures and the Mellon Foundation, Ameelio became a recognized leader in the space. Because of this experience both Zo and Gabe understood what it took to create change from within the system. After serving over 1M people impacted by incarceration, they witnessed firsthand the gap in second-chance opportunities and the chronic unemployment plaguing those impacted by the justice system. Emerge Career is committed to solving this issue.

Our students are at the heart of our work. Their journeys have captured national attention on CBS, NBC, and in The Boston Globe, and our programs now serve entire states and cities. And we’re not doing it alone: our vision has attracted support from Alexis Ohanian (776),  Michael Seibel, Y Combinator, the Opportunity Fund, and public figures like Diana Taurasi, Deandre Ayton, and Marshawn Lynch. All of us believe that, with the right mix of technology and hands-on practice, we can redefine workforce development and deliver true second chances at scale.

Why We Do This:

Emerge Career was designed to tackle two systemic issues: recidivism, fueled by post-incarceration unemployment and poverty, and labor shortages in key industries. Over 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed a year after incarceration, seeking work but not finding it. The reality is shocking, workforce development programs are severely limited inside prison, with only one-third of incarcerated people ever participating. To worsen, the available prison jobs offer meager wages, often less than $1 per hour, and often do not equip individuals with the skills for long-term stable employment.

About the Role

We call this a Founding Engineer role—even three years in and with multiple state contracts under our belt—for two reasons. First, you'll be one of our earliest product hires, joining a co-founder who has built the platform solo to date. Second, our growth is outpacing our funnel, and the difference between a student who graduates and a student who drops off often comes down to a single screen, a single email, or a single moment of friction we haven't fixed yet. We're at a critical juncture: we can either hire someone to ship tickets, or we can bring on a growth- and product-obsessed engineer who believes that thoughtful funnels, relentless iteration, and a deep understanding of our students can dramatically change outcomes—and dramatically lower our cost of acquisition. We hope that can be you.

This is not a traditional engineering job. You'll own our student learning platform end to end, and the work you ship will directly move our CAC. Every percentage point of improvement in landing-page conversion, application completion, and activation is money we don't have to spend on outreach and paid acquisition—and more students we can serve with the same dollar. You'll live in the funnel. You'll watch session recordings. You'll A/B test headlines. You'll rewrite onboarding flows late at night because you saw three students get stuck in the same place. You'll ship mocks you drew yourself rather than wait a week for design.

The majority of our students access the platform from a phone, often on spotty connections, often on shared or low-end devices. And yet we don't have a mobile app yet—our current platform is a PWA app. We're looking for someone who sees that as the opportunity it is: redesigning core flows for the phone, shipping a mobile-first experience, and treating "does this actually work on a $100 Android" as a first-class requirement. Mobile performance and mobile UX aren't polish—they're the product.

This role blends engineering, product, growth, and design. We're looking for someone who is energized by ownership, obsessed with conversion and completion metrics, and excited to work across domains to make the funnel hum. If you get a dopamine hit from watching completion rates tick up and CAC tick down after a change you shipped that morning, you'll thrive here.

What You'll Be Doing

• Increase course completion. You'll be the owner for the product our students spend hundreds of hours inside. Every flow, every form, every lesson page, every nudge—it's yours to shape. You'll prioritize ruthlessly to increase conversion based on where students get stuck.
• Driving down CAC through product. Every flow you improve, every friction point you remove, every onboarding step you shorten translates directly into a lower cost of acquisition. You'll be measured on it. When marketing spends a dollar, you make that dollar go further by making sure the students it brings in actually convert, activate, and complete.
• Going mobile-first. Our students live on their phones. You'll lead the charge on making the platform feel native on mobile—whether that means a serious responsive rebuild, and eventually a real native app. You'll obsess over mobile performance and the kinds of UX decisions that only matter when your user is on a cracked screen on a bus.
• Driving conversion for our online training. From landing page to application, application to first lesson, first lesson to enrollment—every step is a conversion event you're responsible for. You'll instrument what isn't measured, benchmark what is, and run experiments to move the numbers that matter.
• Shipping designs without waiting on anyone. We don't have a designer, and we don't want that to be a bottleneck. You're comfortable opening Figma, sketching a flow, translating it into React, and shipping it the same day. Taste matters. Speed matters more.
• Talking to students constantly. Great growth engineers don't guess—they know. You'll hop on calls with students who dropped off to find out why. You'll text students who just completed a module to ask what worked. You'll bring those insights back into the product within hours, not weeks.
• Running experiments with real rigor. You'll set up A/B tests, define success metrics before you ship, and be honest with yourself about what worked. You'll kill your own ideas when the data says to, and double down when it says to do that instead.
• Building AI into the learning experience. We don't bolt AI on for the sake of it. We use it where it meaningfully improves a student's path—personalized feedback, adaptive pacing, automated coaching nudges, content generation for new trades. You'll be the one turning those opportunities into shipped features.
• Documenting what you ship and why. When you change a funnel, operations needs to know. When you ship a new onboarding flow, the coaching team needs to know. You write clearly, concisely, and consistently so the whole team stays aligned.

Requirements

• Willing to relocate and work in-person in New York City.
• Passionate about working with underrepresented communities and tackling challenges related to poverty, incarceration, and inequity.
• Experience taking a product from 0 to 1. You've led a product line, founded something, shipped an impressive side project, or been one of the first few engineers at an early-stage startup—and you have conversion, retention, or CAC numbers you're proud of.
• A growth mindset in the literal sense. You think in funnels. You think in CAC, activation, and completion. You can explain the last three experiments you ran, why you ran them, what you learned, and what you shipped as a result.
• Comfortable designing. You don't need to be a designer, but you can mock up a flow, iterate on it, and ship it without waiting for someone else. In a pre-AI world, you were already dabbling in Figma to remove blockers.
• You've owned a live app in the App Store or Google Play with thousands of active users. Nobody needs to explain to you why responding to a 1-star review at 11pm matters, or why a hotfix ships before a feature. You've lived the full maintenance cycle—OTA updates, review cadences, OTE impacts, rating management—and you know from experience that a 4.2 creeping toward 3.8 is an acquisition problem, not just a support problem. You treat the app store like a product surface, not a deployment checkbox.
• Strong with React and TypeScript. This is our stack, and you love it.

Bonus Points

• Experience building AI-native products or integrating AI into existing software in ways that actually improve user outcomes—not just for the demo.
• Experience in ed-tech, bootcamps, or any product where user completion is the north-star metric
• Experience owning growth, activation, retention, or CAC at an early-stage company
• Experience running A/B tests and working with analytics tools (PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel, etc.)
• Experience coaching or mentoring individuals one-on-one
• Experience collaborating closely with operations or support teams